The premise of this article is a bit disingenuous or naive or something. Minimalism as a design aesthetic goes back a long time in different settings; if you're

The premise of this article is a bit disingenuous or naive or something. Minimalism as a design aesthetic goes back a long time in different settings; if you're familiar with the history of Chinese ceramics you'll be familiar with this. Over the centuries tastes swung from more minimalist designs to more baroque ones. Both have appeal and there's no reason to assume, as the piece does, that there's something odd about minimalist aesthetics. Shaker design is similar, etc. The other thing to recognize is that there's a certain skill in minimalism too. Baroque designs make it much easier to hide flaws in craftmanship, and it takes a certain advanced skillset to hide structural features that are needed. To take a hypothetical example, if you're building wood furniture, it's much more difficult (or at least as difficult) to make a strong joint that's hidden and seamless, than to screw it together with an exposed screw, or to hide the screw with a decorative feature. If you mess something up architecturally, it's extremely difficult to hide it on a smooth surface with no texture. When you don't have any trim, everything has to be perfect. I'm sure the same applies to clothing and all sorts of things. Even if none of this were true I think it's fairly simple: a large proportion of people liking something because it's traditional is actually a reason to abandon it among the [self-perceived if nothing else] cutting-edge. It's old-fashioned, out of touch, etc. It will come again but in different forms. Finally, I really don't think traditional stuff isn't made anymore. It's just appearing in different places. There's plenty of "transitional" traditional homes out there, they just don't appear in architectural magazines or even large newspapers because no one wants to highlight them unless they're neo-something-interesting. The piece raises questions I've sort of wondered about sometimes but overall it seems to be driven by a set of assumptions that aren't necessarily warranted. It comes across to me as trying to justify their own preferences really.